Monday, January 26, 2009

Gee, thanks a lot, HSBC!

In July 2008, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. (HSBC) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF Philippines) launched Project Eco-Kids to educate public elementary school students about climate change and practical solutions they can adopt in their daily lives to help address it....Depending on the size of the school, anywhere from 15 to 50 of HSBC’s staff volunteers visit various public elementary schools once a week. Together with WWF facilitators, they teach the hour-long modules to up to a hundred nine-year olds. ...Aside from environmental holidays, such as World Environment Day and Earth Day, HSBC Philippines developed internal ‘environmental holidays.

In May last year, the bank held Global Warming Day, shutting down the office and branch air conditioners an hour earlier than usual. Employees who felt the heat were treated to free ice cream, while WWF volunteers stood by to offer free carbon footprint testing to interested bank staffers.

The opportunities for banks from climate change are huge, according to HSBC, one of the world’s biggest banks.

“We can finance a wholesale shift to a low carbon economy”, Jon Williams, head of sustainable development for the bank, told the summit. “Climate change can be tackled at minimal economic cost if we do it today”.

Let's say that Exxon openly engaged in similar school programs to spread climate realism to the world's nine-year-olds. How would the mainstream media treat that story?